[R-SIG-Mac] How to move existing packages?

[G. Sawitzki]

This is a late follow up to
 <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mac/2013-April/010045.html>

Is there a useful implementation to move existing packages?

This comes up if there is a new R release and you want your old
collection updated, but work on a system that does versioning (e.g. OS X).

The message referred above suggests to use the GUI Package Installer,
but at least on OS X this functionality does not exist.

On a command level, this might be implemeted as a variant of
update.packages() with an additional parameter old.lib.loc (or a changed
semantics for oldPkgs: get a list of packages from old.lib.loc, and
update these to lib.loc.

The design problem is that R does not keep a memory of where a package
has been installed. So an iteration over a list of repositories might be
needed.

   g.


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G. Sawitzki
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